"How China in the 80s": Dilapidated infrastructure cripples the U.S.

Three hours sitting World Bank Chief Economist Justin Lin on the train, even if he is the fastest connection for the connection between Washington to New York chooses. In the emerging economy of China , the birthplace Lin, a high speed train takes only half the time for the 360 kilometre route, he calculates. It is a good example of the poor state of U.S. infrastructure. Improvement is hardly in sight. Falling tax revenues and political gridlock even more endanger the already ailing status quo.

Lin lives in the vicinity of Washington. Around the U.S. capital, power outages are common. This is a fatal combination of vulnerable above-ground power lines and trees along the routes. "Every time when a strong wind blowing, we have a power outage," says the long-suffering Lin. "It reminds me of China in the 1980s." In a report to the international competitiveness of the "World Economic" forum proves the U.S. infrastructure is only ranked 24th of 142, behind Malaysia. Germany comes in 10th place

Spending on infrastructure, has a drop in decades - to about 2.4 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in 2007, as the budget authority of the U.S. Congress tells. More recent figures are not there. European governments spend, on average about 5 percent. This leads to these devastating effects:

- One third of all main roads are in poor condition. 36 percent of all urban highways are congested as ever. Main problems are potholes and cracks in the asphalt.

- The railway is regarded as unreliable. Train passengers arrive on time in Europe at up to 90 percent of trips in the United States at 77 percent. There are no high-speed rail networks. The express train "Acela Express" runs between Washington and Boston because of the bad tracks on average 115 kilometres per hour.

- Many of the often outdated airports are congested, delays are commonplace. Dating back to the 1950s, air traffic control system should be replaced with more efficient models, according to expert opinion.

- More than a quarter of the 600,000 bridges no longer meet the optimal standard of safety, even as more than 160,000 are in danger of collapse. 13 people died in the collapse of an aging highway bridge in Minneapolis in 2007.

- The average age of more than 85,000 dams in the United States is 51 years. Over 4,000 of these have serious security flaws. The State of Texas is as a mere seven engineers to monitor its more than 7,400 dams.

- The above-ground cables are extremely vulnerable. Damaged as a falling power line road, go right out the lights in the whole district. Because this happens with almost every storm, power stations advise citizens to purchase generators. As the 2003 hurricane "Isabel" struck the east coast of the United States, some 45 million Americans sat in the dark.

But neither President Obama nor his Republican challenger Mitt Romney has the infrastructure crisis as an election issue. The White House had indeed called in his budget proposal for 2012 infrastructure issues as a "crucial" for growth and competitiveness of the country, but to the Obama campaign site, nothing is on. There simply is no money. Mitt Romney, however, also promotes the privatization of the rail company Amtrak, with the yearly subsidies of 1.6 billion dollars (1.25 billion Euros) will be kept going.

Not even five cents per litre tax

 The national debt and economic crisis overshadow the infrastructure debate. The debts amount to more than 100 percent of GDP, since 2007, the annual deficits greater than one trillion dollars. Infrastructure improvements will be financed partly through a fuel tax - currently it is 4.86 cents per litre of gasoline and 6.45 cents for diesel. It takes about 32 billion dollars per year, but fall since the onset of the economic crisis revenue. An increase is seen as politically difficult to implement.

Already in 2008, estimated a specially appointed Congress Commission that about 255 billion dollars a year are necessary to own the transportation infrastructure in the next 50 years, maintain and improve - the expenditure in that year, less than half were of them, tend to fall.